Healing The Relationship To Our Body

We take a deep dive this season, into relationships. Complex Trauma as an attachment wound. It seems absolutely necessary to visit the topic of relationship to our body, relationship to ourself, and this is a topic that you and I love to explore. It's really how we got started on this path of healing was our disordered relationship with food and with our bodies. I'm so happy to jump into this conversation today and hopefully take

it to a pretty deep level for folks to look at. If you're a coach, therapist or practitioner and you want to learn how to work with the body and the nervous system and the brain to create lasting, sustainable change for your clients, join us for a free workshop this January to teach a Neurosomatic Intelligence framework and tools that brings change from the level of the nervous system out into the world. Matt Bush, Melanie Weller and I

will be teaching. It's free and we'd love to see you there. The link is in the show notes, or you can go to, neurosomaticintelligence.com to sign up. Welcome everyone to, Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what you can do to heal. My name's, Elizabeth Kristoff. I'm the founder of Brain Based Wellness, an online platform that teaches you to train your nervous system for resilience and behavior change.

I'm your co host, Jennifer Wallace, a Neurosomatic Psychedelic Preparation and Integration Guide, bridging the powerful modalities of neurosomatic intelligence and plant healing medicine spaces. I don't think there's any way we could avoid this being a big conversation. This is the most sacred relationship that we can enter into and having a relationship to the body is a core cornerstone element to embodiment,

to presence. Based on everything that we talk about, having an adverse relationship to the body is actually quite dangerous. It impacts the way we speak to ourselves, limiting beliefs, food patterns like you said. It was those unhealed food patterns that really brought me into this deeper work, because it gave me so much compassion and like a weight was lifted from me when I learned that binge eating was a protective survival output.

When I heard those words, it just like this giant puzzle of my life all came together and I could see how I survived through food, but also in that relationship, either to food, in the binge eating way of either that thread or through the diet culture thread. Both were very, very dangerous and both kept me more disconnected from my body, and it really kept me in an abusive relationship in the way that I spoke to and believed about my body.

So, healing it and being in a different place now is a really new experience, and it's awesome. I think even if people don't consider themselves having disordered eating or like an abusive relationship to their body, there's so many ways that we are disconnected from our body or unable to hear its internal signals. Sometimes, people can hear this and not think. It's a very important component of healing and of

personal development and personal growth. But you and I know because we see so many clients that are really high performing individuals, really doing big things in the world. Butm underneath, there's a really dysfunctional relationship to their own body, and it robs them of so much of their ability, like you were talking about, to be embodied, to be present, to do the deep work of healing, because they can connect to the body and process those things through, and also just takes a lot of

the joy out of life, like the success that they're building. They don't get to experience because there's these deep loops of body shame and body dysmorphia and abuse to their body through diet, culture, and overtraining. I was just speaking with one of my friends and clients the other day, and they were going to meet some coworkers that they hadn't seen in a long time that they had good, deep relationships with and really wanted to enjoy

that meeting. But the message to me was, all I can think about as I'm getting ready is how much weight I've gained and what they're going to be thinking about me in this moment. And this is like a super successful person that's doing great things in the world that everybody loves. In these other relationships is like, you can't show up and be present and have the experience of connecting with other people because you're stuck in the body loop. Oh,

that's so relatable. I mean, the closet meltdowns that I've had over the course of my life trying to fit into where I'm going into, whether that's the professional meeting, something with pilates based or wherever I was practicing movement as a teacher, either here on the podcast at Barton Springs, like, it was constantly having to calm that voice, and it got really. I mean, I had so many limiting beliefs based on my value in the

clothes, size that I wore, or if this. If this role showed up in this way, I had to sit perfectly to make sure that my posture was in a certain way, so I could suck my gut in in a certain way, depending on what I'm wearing. I would really posture myself in the room in a way that made me feel the most comfortable in my body. And it would be all that I could think about. All that I could think about was all that. I mean, it

diminished the value. It buried me in unworthiness because I couldn't see through that fogged lens. So that client, I think that lady that you just spoke of is very relatable for people. I think so many people have this going on. I want us today to take a deep dive. You know, there's so many components of this. There's a physical component about regulation and safety. There's an

emotional component, there's a belief component. To really look from a neurosomatic perspective about where all of this comes from, how it lives in our body and our nervous system. I want to start by really thinking about this idea that our perception of our own body, it depends on the integration of our body signals from

outside of us, our extraception. We talk about that a lot, taking in sensory inputs from our eyes, from our skin, from our balance system in our inner ear, and the signals that we experience inside our interoception, the felt sense inside of the body. Both of these systems contribute to our body image. That's the picture we have in our mind's eye; the size, the shape, the form of our bodies and our feelings

concerning those characteristics. So, body image is really this multidimensional physical and psychological experience of embodiment. It's all the things we talk about when we're talking about embodiment, especially in the physical appearance, our awareness of our body and our emotions and sensations that relate to it. This includes, our feelings around our self perceptions, our beliefs about ourself, our beliefs and attitudes towards our

body. We talk a lot, about creating safety internally so that we can experience safe relationships and be a safe space for ourselves to process emotions, and also a safe space for other people to co regulate with. All of this can be really difficult if we have these big deficits in our input systems, these problems with our interception, and because of that, have a very disorganized, sometimes abusive relationship with our body. So, from a neurosomatic perspective, so many things

affect the relationship to the body. Visual deficits, complex trauma, dissociation, interceptive deficits, societal structures, diet, culture, body hierarchy. I mean, there's so much so there's a lot to dive into today and all this impacts our health and our relationship with others. You know, when I hear you talk about interoception, I wonder, if I could've detected that I had a tumor in my body? If I had more accurate interoception, if I could feel into my body more -can anybody do

that? Create new, that kind of deep relationship with the body? Interoceptive ability is really important. As we're going to get into it is going to play a role into the sensory mismatch that we're going to talk about when we talk about body dysmorphia. And the limiting beliefs are just so important because back to that voice that comes in. I mean, is that the sneaky voice of the harsh inner critic, or is that a loving, pillow talking

voice that is really kind and supportive to you throughout the day? This really matters. It really matters because it has an emotional tag to it. And that emotional tag, that belief tag, that whole neurotag, that chunk, it gets all pulled up together. We can't avoid the limiting belief without the unwanting behavior and with the emotional component that comes to it.

Having a punishing or adverse relationship with your body, it is going to come with a lot of toxic and chronic stress that you don't really want to turn away from your body. It's interesting to know that and understand I'm creating dysregulation and internalizing a lot of stress by not being able to connect to my body and to still have it be really hard. I think it's hard for a number of reasons for people to be able to really have, a level of intimacy with their own body and

to feel those feelings. In addition to all the parts of our society that disconnect us from our body, like diet, culture and the myriad of ways we're taught to separate our cognitive mind from our body. All our somatic memories live in our body. This is where we experience the physiological part of a trigger when we get re triggered. That can be really challenging to stay connected in the body.

There are many reasons people would want to leave or harm or punish their body because there's a lot of big stuff in there that the cognitive mind has been repressing for a long time because it's overwhelming and it's big. The body is often where we face the outcomes of our trauma. Our mind can repress it and cognitively, we can shove it down and not have to experience it and come to the surface, but in our body, it can express as disease or

pain or discomfort. So we have to face sometimes, the consequences of stress and trauma in our body. And that can lead us to, like, a real adversarial relationship with our body, because it carries those consequences. We had a conversation with, Luis Mojica and we talked about capacity. I think a lot of times, we want a different capacity than we really have, and our body

tells the truth about that capacity. A lot of times, our body has been holding so much and experiencing these years of stress and dysregulation that maybe we weren't cognitively aware of. And we want our capacity to be different, to handle different levels of stress and performance in our life. But, it can feel like our body is holding us back, because that capacity of the body doesn't really measure what our expectations are and this can lead to a really fractured, kind of punishing

relationship with the body. When the brain, when the cognitive narrative and the body are not in sync and they are not speaking together, and they are not communicating together, this is not a good relationship. We need for the capacity to grow, to experience this, whatever we're experiencing in our bodies, and to know that what we're experiencing is truth. One of the things that you just talked about were those somatic memories living

in the body. Those memories are often so rooted in shame and fear and anger and death, what feels like I'm gonna die every day in complex trauma. Then it's like, you wouldn't have that out in your flower vase every day. You'd hide it. You'd put it in the garage, you'd shove it into a corner if that was something that you could tangibly pick up. Like, we're not talking about high vibrational,

beautiful things. We're talking about hard emotions in the body that create a lot of inflammation, and I mean a lot of gut dysfunction, a lot of bad feelings in the body, feelings of unwellness in the body. When we talk about dangerous, these emotions being dangerous in the body, we are talking about gut function. We're talking about

autoimmune, we're talking about cancer. We're talking about some really big chronic illnesses and even little ones that maybe even if you view eczema on the spectrum of something a little bit smaller there before it moves into something a little bit bigger, but when we can start to communicate with the body a little bit kinder, because when we've had this massive disconnect, you need to start kind of understanding your truths a little bit more.

So much of regulation allows for the capacity of you knowing of your truths and that them being okay, them starting to get a little bit more neutralized in their emotional pain. But when you have something where you're so disconnected and now you want to form this relationship to the body, you have to start getting a little bit kinder, a little bit more gentle. It's really an experience when you disconnect between cognitive and, and

somatic. When we kind of, I think these two start to bring and bridge themselves together, it's almost a, very hot vs cold - where presence and embodiment feel very infantile in a way. Like, just baby, like, I'm here and oh, shit, this is big. I'm here in the body now and it's a sort of touch and go. You're sort of in and out, and then all of a sudden, boom, one day you're in and things are harmonized much, much better.

Yeah, it's a process. You know, it's interesting that you brought up eczema because I have this patch of eczema kind of like underneath my right arm, in my right armpit and down the side of my body. It started during a period of incredible stress for me - really, really high stress period of my life that came. I have not been able to get it to fully resolve and go away. I used to carry a lot of shame around it. It was like just one of those things that you don't want people to see. You want

to cover it up. Now, I just use it as a signal from my body. I'm just monitoring it - to see if my nervous system is getting better or worse, is my inflammation going down. I'm just kind of inquisitive with it. I'll be like, hey, what do you need? How you doing? Someone, actually, several people have been like, you could just put steroid cream on that. But I don't want to. I want to know if my body's and my nervous system is actually getting

better. I want to let that be a way that my body communicates with me about if my neuropractic is really moving me forward in a positive direction. It's just an output. Hell yeah. That's awesome. It's a beautiful way to look at your output in the way that your body speaks to you, because that's the thing. Our bodies are speaking to us, and we are not listening. Yeah, it's normal to have anxiety. It is normal to

get a rash if you're under too much stress. There's so much that is not normalized about the way that our body speaks to us that we're supposed to put band Aids on. Mm hmm. Yep and it keeps blocking out those signals. I think the thing that I see clients struggle with the most is their weight, the way their body is shaped by their extra weight that they carry. It's hard to touch that part of the body., you know? We all do. Sometimes we'll do some

stuff with vagus nerve and we have to vibrate on. On the tummy or we do some things. It actually, changed the way I use cues because there's certain words I think are really triggering for people like, to use the word, tummy, or the word belly - I think sometimes, it's loaded. It's loaded. It's a really loaded story. That's one of the hardest things about the relationship to the body and about cultivating the presence

and embodiment. As practitioners, we know that these narratives are very layered, and we want to support people coming into their bodies safely, feeling their emotions safely, and supporting emotional processing that could be holding them back from being present, connected in relationships, and having the capacity to experience the good stuff

in life, like joy and pleasure. The next round of NSI is enrolling now at, neurosomaticintelligence.com It's amazing how, you can be in this really evolved place, the people that we work with are really smart and, like, emotionally intelligent and very progressive, including me, including everyone. We can all get stuck in these deep loops about body size, and that pattern runs crazy deep. Back to the binging and the

protective output. There were parts of my body that I would and I know I've listened to clients say this, too, parts of my body that I would hold onto and curse. I would be so abusive to that part of my body. The language inside of me is not going to get me where I want to be in my body. Yes, underneath everything else that people are looking at and trying to grow and develop with, there's this relationship and the

difficulty of this relationship. Recently, in our Facebook group, someone asked a question relating to body image and body dysmorphia that I thought was really, really good question. They were asking if you could be dissociated and also hypercritical of your body at the same time. They just couldn't see how those two could link up. They were like, if I'm detached from my body, I can't feel my body so, how am I also hypercritical of it, have all this

hypervigilance and perfectionism around it? The answer, from my perspective, is like a resounding, Yes! You can absolutely have both. At the same time, you can have dissociation and the interceptive deficits that come of that. Tthat can lead to actually more objectification of your body because when we are living under high stress, and dissociation is a well worn protective output. It's something that our body and our nervous system go to frequently. We know that -

we get better at it.. So that becomes a protective strategy when body sensations are overwhelming. The more we dissociate, the less those pathways of being able to relay signals from our body to our brain get fuel, get activation, and so they atrophy. If we don't use it, we lose it. Interception and extraception as well, for body signals, both have a huge impact on our ability to connect to our body. When we don't have that ability, we're more likely to objectify

our own body to be removed from it. Studies have shown this.. There was a recent study in 2013 that showed that the degree to which individuals are aware of their inner body signals was inversely correlated with self objectification. Meaning the more you could connect to your own body, the less you objectified yourself and the less you had a tendency to experience your body as an

object. The more we see our body as an object, the more likely we are to have that abusive relationship with the body trying to make it fit into a certain form. With these studies, when they had two samples of healthy participants, results showed that lower intraceptive accuracy, like using people measuring their heartbeats perception, was associated with higher body dissatisfaction and, like, harsher critique of the body

and more objectification. Definitely, the more dissociation we have, the more likely we can be in that objectified relationship with our body. Definitely. I definitely think that both can be existing at the same time. That was me existing at the same time for so long, dissociated and very hypercritical of my body. People who struggle with body dysmorphia also struggle with visual deficits. A number of visual processing abnormalities are

present in body dysmorphia. That could include facial recognition, emotional identification, aesthetics, and object recognition. So, a few minutes ago, we were talking about sensory mis-match and the interoceptive system. So, sensory mismatch, is when the brain is receiving different information from two systems of the brain that it needs to trust for survival. Basically, in a nutshell, it chooses. I'm going to let you explain sensory mismatch.

When we have sensory mismatch in the paradigm of body dysmorphia, we're talking about mismatch being communicated between the visual system and the interoceptive system. They are not integrating, and they're saying two different things. The way that the brain works is we don't see what's really there in front of us, but we see what our brain projects, our brain projects into our awareness, what we think we should see, not what's actually there.

When I think about this visual deficit and body dysmorphia, my own story, I have known for some time that I had a lazy left eye. It's called atropia. I would situate myself in pictures all the time so that it wouldn't be as noticeable. I would actively say inside, okay, open your left eye, smile big with your left eye. It wasn't as noticeable to other people. But then, of course, NSI comes along and I began to understand

that this was a deficit. I could train it because it was also resulting in so much of my dysregulation by going into my deficit, it was going into my threat bucket every day. Llike all paths, it just got more well worn. In times of heavy stress, you will see that eye sort of kick off and want to do its own thing. But all that to say, you know, and we can talk about the visual training that we do that goes along with healing our left eye deficits.

I know you have the same thing, but this all affects the way I perceive myself to look. It's my perception and so, healing this deficit or working to heal this deficit is a really big deal for me. It's a big deal and it's a big goal. I feel it's impacts in me and the way that I'm in, the way that I respond to things. We recently posted a reel of us paddling down on one of the rivers and I didn't even think twice about being in a bathing suit. Being in a bathing suit on social media - that is a

whole new version of me that never existed before. Until last week. I know that the training that I'm doing is really make a difference in the way that I'm living my life. I heard you say one time, that you use to always look around for your body when you would be in public. I mean ... I really related to that too, because I used to always look for it like, do I look like that? Do I look like that? Do I look like that girl? Very recently, probably in

the past couple of years or so. I've spoken on here many times about how I came to terms with my body at, Barton Springs. Being in swimming places in a bathing suit was such a new experience for me a couple of years ago - I hadn't done that for decades. It was that voice about my own body. It started to quiet down, and so did the voices about other people's bodies then, my own body as a result, got to be more free in the world. Training with intention, really shifts your

projections. There's a couple really important things that I just want to highlight that you talked about. First, definitely I did that all the time. I would walk around and think, does that person's body look like mine? Do my legs look like that? Does this look like that? I just couldn't get a clear picture of my body. That comes from so much dissociation and

disconnection from the body. I can't feel it. But, also my proprioceptive map, my body mapping abilities of knowing where my body is in space - there's another deficit there that needs to be rehabilitated. You mentioned that our visual system isn't actually what's there, it's a projection. I think that's super, super important for people to take just a pause and think about for a second. What we're seeing is a brain's projection, not the real data of what's out there. Like, for example, our eyes

are always making little micro movements. They're always shifting around all the time. If, we were really seeing what was coming in directly through the eyes, the world would appear shaky, but we don't because our brain takes that information in and it kind of puts it all together in this 15 previous second picture of what's going on around us, that's stable. That information, just like every other sensory information

that's taken in through the world, is filtered. It's filtered through our beliefs, our perceptions, what data our brain thinks is important. To make it up to our cognitive awareness. When we look at our body in the mirror, we're really seeing a projection of what our brain thinks we should see, not what is really there. In that way, like our beliefs and our deficits and our sensory mismatch, it really creates an entirely new experience of reality when we look in the mirror. That's

so, so important. Sensory mismatch and just understanding how threatening that is to our nervous system as just you were saying, is when different input systems that our brain relies on to give us information about the world around us and ourselves doesn't match. So, my eyes are telling my brain that reality is one way. My ears, the balance system in my inner ears are saying, reality is a different way. My body map is saying, your body's this way in space,

and it doesn't match up. To create a clear, cohesive, accurate picture, remember that our brains function on pattern recognition and prediction and they generate an output that's trying to keep us alive. When the information coming in doesn't match up, our brain has to decide, which one of these systems do I want to listen to to make that prediction. Making that decision every single second is actually incredibly energy costly to our

brain. It really drives up the level of threat that our nervous system is under, because our brains always having to be like, "Which one is right? Which one is right?" The stakes are high and survival is the reason we're trying to generate that prediction. So, when our visual deficits don't match up with our interceptive system, it's really creating a high threat load.

If our brain decides to go with the visual information, it's another reason why we might dampen those signals coming from in our body, because our brain doesn't want all that conflicting information coming in. Then, it decides that another system just kind of falls down the hierarchy and it gets better at what it does, so it just gets better at not paying attention or relying on that

system. Yep. You know, we have many episodes when we talk about relationship to the body and food and disordered eating, and we always talk about the nervous system, the brain, the body is using food and our behaviors for regulation, to create safety and to regulate the nervous system for emotional regulation or perhaps repressing or suppressing big emotions that we don't feel we have the capacity to deal with. Our beliefs are the neurotags of beliefs that are in there, driving our

behavior. All three of these things have a component in our interoceptive system because we have a part of our interceptive system. We've talked a lot this season about the insular cortex. There's a part in the back part of the interceptive system where we integrate all of our sensory information that's coming in, and we answer the question, "Am I safe or unsafe?" Our interoceptive system integrates

our sensory information and then produces a response. That's going to directly impact if we are dysregulated or if we're regulated. Also, in our insular cortex, in the middle part of our insula, that has a lot to do with our emotional experience and it connects to our anterior cingulate cortex, also talked about here, which contains our beliefs about ourself, and it connects also to our limbic system. That's what allows us to experience our emotions

in our body. Our insular cortex and our hypothalamus work together to make feelings felt. They turn emotions into physical sensations. So, lot of the reasons why this can drive our emotional relationship to sensations. Then that creates behaviors like, overtraining or maladaptive food behaviors or dissociation from the body. Then, there's another part of the interceptive system that connects to our prefrontal cortex, where our beliefs about ourselves live and where all of our choices are made.

There's a huge component of our beliefs about ourself and our decision making that's driven by our interceptive inputs as well. If you're having interceptive issues, it's hard to find safety in any of these areas; regulations, emotions, or beliefs. As it goes for food, your interoceptive system is what tells you that you're full or you're hungry. There's so much about our society or maybe

about our family growing up. It's so interesting, when I think about bingeing, I believe it's part survival, definitely, but it's also part learned, because my mom was a binge eater as well, particularly in my very small years growing up. She really taught me how to binge and so much. I would see her go training super hard. She would binge, and then the next day, she'd be Jane Fonda. She'd be out there doing her thing. I got that same pattern.

I would binge, and then I would train so hard. It was like moving my body was punishment, not a celebration of how strong I am or how easily I move, or the ways in which I can move my body. Movement was punishment for how I punished my body with food. I think, too, there's that which disrupts the connection to the body. The whole diet culture thing, we're really talking about a billions of dollars industrial complex, an oppressive system dedicated, billions of dollars dedicated to keep

you away from your body. It tells you where to eat, when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat. Count this, count that. I'm not saying that some of those tools are not effective, but there needs to be a balance in how much you also know and trust your body to speak to you, to know, when I eat this, that's not good for me. I feel

the inflammation happen in my body when I eat this. So, there's also this balance of, like, first you need to kind of, you want to come into the body and start learning about it and learning to hear those signals. First of all, to trust those signals, like we're saying, train them. Train the communication of the body. Train the brain and nervous system so that you are getting more accurate information. Then, start carving

out some of those beliefs, start excavating some of that. Why am I speaking to myself like this? What is this behavior all about? Why am I finding myself in the fridge or in the pantry or in huge times of deficits, caloric deficits and starvation? What is happening here? Am I intentionally eating? What is happening? What's so big right now? Like, the keto thing and the. ... What do you call it when you don't eat for a while? Intermittent fasting. Oh, my God. Intermittent fasting.

There's nothing wrong with these things if you are doing it safely in a body that you are sinking with, you know, vibing with, It's really important. The emotional component that you talk about, the emotional component is huge because the emotions, just like the well worn pathway of fighting or whatever. If the well worn pathways fight, I speak for myself here, then there's a well worn pathway for repressed anger. It keeps you in the emotions and will keep you in the cycles

of emotional abuse with your body. Not just, physical abuse when you're binging or starving because then you have the emotional abuse layer of how you are in your body. Totally. One of the important things you were talking about was how movement becomes linked with punishment. When I think about that from a nervous system and a brain health perspective, our brain's first job is our survival. Its second

job is for movement. We're made to move and the quality of our movement and the ability to move in so many ways, right? Like move for emotional expression, move with quality movement. As we walk through the world, what patterns are we bracing? Are we moving fluidly? All of this is so important to our health. If movement gets so inextricably linked with punishment and harm to our nervous system and our body, that can be really damaging for living a life that is aligned with nervous system health.

To have movement as be an expression of emotion and also something that we are built to do and to enjoy. That that can have a huge impact on people.Tthe emotional abuse that you are talking about with emotional repression. This is so very layered because, one, there's damage being done to our body and our nervous system just when we're not allowing that emotional energy to move through.

Like, full stop. When I'm holding in all of these big emotions that is damaging to my tissue, to my immune system, to my nervous system, and then also, too, with emotional repression or suppression that always comes to. With the maladaptive behaviors that we have to use in order to keep those emotions suppressed. It leads u s- for you

and me, it often looks like binging. For a lot of people, it looks like substance or social media scrolling or maybe overtraining as a distraction from feeling those emotions and being able to sit with them and move them through. When we lose our ability to connect to our body and then to be able to safely express and move emotional energy through, that leads to more harm to the body and then to behaviors that also harm the body and further disconnect us from ourselves.

Then we have the driving perfectionism around our bodies and the hyper vigilance that happens mostly around people. You know, I was saying in the beginning about the way that my clothes would fit and how I would position myself in rooms and at tables and around people and, God, it would be constant. If I was wearing one of those body shapers, I'd be so worried about, like, constantly, is that little bit of fat poking up outside of my back, or is the leg shaper doing something funny?

That drove me away from the presence of the people I was with. Sometimes those were really important, or engagements with family that I'll never be able to return back to, because I was dissociated and in high driving perfectionism and hyper visions around my body, which you can never meet. I could never meet the expectation of what I walked into my closet for and how I was going to walk out of that closet. Like these two pictures, these feelings never

matched each other. That was hard. I feel like decades of my life were spent in obsessive perfectionism about my body. That led to very abusive relationship with overtraining, like you said, using it as punishment for binge eating episodes. This season is all about relationships and talking about how we need those social connections. We've explored how presence is an important part of actually being able to get the healing benefits

of social connection, or any healing benefits. We have to be present to experience the impacts of what that does for our nervous system and for our health. In this way, when we're stuck in these loops of hyper vigilance and perfectionism, we're never really present to experience the social connection, the co regulation, the community that we need for our nervous system to be healthy and process stress, and to have that social support that is so important.

Really, so many years of my life, where every event that I went to, everything that I did, I was really detached from being in the present reality and connecting with people because my mind was entirely focused on my body. It's a really new experience to feel good in my body. I mean, this is interesting. I don't know always each day how I'm going to perceive my body when I wake up. A lot of what

I experience in my body is inflammation. I notice that now just from some gut health and some metabolic stuff that has been impeded by stress and trauma. Right, like, not cycling through the, "f's" properly. When we're in a, "f response", you don't need your digestive system. I was in a chronic state of, "f survival", and now I'm trying to kind of get things moving back to the interoceptive system and the gut and a healthy vagus nerve.

Although I don't necessarily understand my perception of my body, each day I show up for it and I meet it and greet it with loving kindness and know that, like, I'm here to meet you, where you are each day. It changes. It really changes each day. As I come into my body, and I'm an embodied human and spirit, now, I understand what I like to eat. I understand what I do not like to eat. I understand the way that my body likes to move. I don't do it for punishment, I

do it for joy. I do it because I want to and it's so liberating. It's so liberating to know that that real is out there. I don't give a, fuck about it. Amen. How we are anywhere, is how we are everywhere, right? If I can start to liberate myself in my relationship to myself and my body, that really does translate and carry through into so many other areas of my life. You know, my ability to set boundaries with other people, my ability to

show up as my full self in other relationships. There's just so much work with shame when we start to really deconstruct all of this. You know, as you and I both have experienced some consequences of trauma - you're a cancer survivor. I have autoimmune disease and we know how important this relationship with the body is. It's still been a journey to get there. It really has. It's still really a journey for me to get there and. But, I will say it's completely possible.

It took, beginning with healing my deficits so that my nervous system had the capacity to begin to deconstruct all these old patterns, behaviors, beliefs, and then continuing to gradually allow myself in minimum effective dose to take new actions, to speak to myself differently, to practice, you know, sensory stimulus with my body and body mapping and spending time with my body and it does. It looks really different today. It looks really different today! My relationship to myself shows.

I don't believe the relationship to the body has an end point. This is the body, you are going to be in relationship with it and it is going to change. Your body is going to change. The way you move with it is going to change. And so also allowing for that to happen. The body is much different in your twenties than it is in your forties. There's so many limiting societal myths out there about the way we age. "Oh, you just lose your vision" or, "Oh, it's just natural that that would

happen". No, that's your nervous system. You get to decide what happens in your visual system. You get to decide how your body lives. For me, what I've experienced is so much of the beginning, part of my journey was really about learning the tools to regulate my nervous system, understanding the emotional experience, getting myself super balanced. And in that, that was a heavy load

to take on there for a couple of years to put my focus into. Now, I have a heavy focus into like the physical part of my body and a goal every day that I push for. For my internal state to match the physical state of my body. I want my body to match how I feel inside. And so these belief. Getting back to belief systems. The beliefs that I now have - I'm worthy. I'm this big creator. My voice is worthy, and I'm valuable beyond

measure. All these. I believe that, but I haven't believed it for long enough that my body has changed to the. You know, because you are your brain, you are your subconscious mind. Your beliefs are all creating that back to the perception. So, it'll be interesting, I think, when I know, I've lived this belief system for so long that there is a reflection in my perception, even though I also understand that. What I'm saying, is I can also train my body to do certain things.

I like to go to the gym, and I do those things. Yes. But I don't overdo it like I used to. To get the body I want, I'm not at the Pilates studio eight times this week and weight training three times and moving, moving, moving, punishing, punishing, punishing. I'm doing it super lightly and in a way that feels like I'm at a good pace with myself. I feel healthy about it. I'm honoring my capacity and finding

joy in some of that movement. It's all super, super different about where the intention is coming from and also having the ability to listen to the signals. I think for us, a lot of this journey began, really, with our food freedom program, and binge eating was the output that led us to start to explore this at a very deep level and pull up some of these patterns emotionally,

belief wise, and regulation. If people are hearing themselves in this conversation, you can join us on the site, on the brain based wellness site for two free weeks of nervous system training and start to learn these tools at, rewiretrial.com. Jennifer and I are on there live and we love to work with people. But, you could also check out the, Food

Freedom Program. If you're someone who likes to self study and wants to take a deep dive into this specific issue, there's a lot of really good content there that is specifically targeted toward restoring the relationship with the body, food, and movement. It's a really incredible program, and I feel like over the decades, I've done just about everything to heal my food narratives. Right now, there's some very popular diet pills out

there. Well, I think they're really for diabetes or something. There's some alternatives out there. I will tell you that the way that we are encouraging you to go will not be the fast route, and it will not be easy, which is why we are there on site with you. That is why we are in the containers with you and why we have such great practitioners to facilitate with brain based wellness. You know, food freedom was a huge program, and it really did change and shape the

way that I view food. I know that now because of where I'm at in my food journey with my body. Yeah, me too. I would love to see all of you there in any capacity on the site, rewiretrial.com or check out the Food Freedom Program. Thanks so much, y'all. Thank you, guys. If you're a coach, a therapist, or a practitioner, you may know that you don't want to go back and revisit trauma over and over and over again in the name of healing. You see that going there, doesn't always actually help your

clients move past it. Maybe, you feel what it does to your own nervous system. You experience the burnout that it creates too much stress for too long, and you know that it's just not as simple as saying it's in the past. Let it go, because the body is holding it and the past continues to shape the present in reactions, in outputs that we experience, and in responses. Trauma resolution is more than talking about the past

and deeper than cognitively distinguished to move forward. Trauma lives in the now, in the body and the nervous system and affects the present moment until we find a way to rehabilitate the system. If you want to learn more about how to do that, get some practical, actionable tools and a framework. We are now enrolling in the next cohort of neurosomatic intelligence certification. You can go to, neurosomaticintelligence.com to learn more. The link is in the show notes can.